scholarly journals The cost of making an eye movement: A direct link between visual working memory and saccade execution

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martijn J. Schut ◽  
Nathan Van der Stoep ◽  
Albert Postma ◽  
Stefan Van der Stigchel
eNeuro ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. ENEURO.0401-17.2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pim Mostert ◽  
Anke Marit Albers ◽  
Loek Brinkman ◽  
Larisa Todorova ◽  
Peter Kok ◽  
...  

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey F. Woodman ◽  
Shaun P. Vecera

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 714-714
Author(s):  
H. Pailian ◽  
J. Halberda

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melonie A. Williams ◽  
Pierre Pouget ◽  
Leanne Boucher ◽  
Geoffrey F. Woodman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pim Mostert ◽  
Anke Marit Albers ◽  
Loek Brinkman ◽  
Larisa Todorova ◽  
Peter Kok ◽  
...  

AbstractThe study of visual working memory (VWM) has recently seen revitalization with the emergence of new insights and theories regarding its neural underpinnings. One crucial ingredient responsible for this progress is the rise of neural decoding techniques. These techniques promise to uncover the representational contents of neural signals, as well as the underlying code and the dynamic profile thereof. Here, we aimed to contribute to the field by subjecting human volunteers to a combined VWM/imagery task, while recording and decoding their neural signals as measured by MEG. At first sight, the results seem to provide evidence for a persistent, stable representation of the memorandum throughout the delay period. However, control analyses revealed that these findings can be explained by subtle, VWM-specific eye movements. As a potential remedy, we demonstrate the use of a functional localizer, which was specifically designed to target bottom-up sensory signals and as such avoids eye movements, to train the neural decoders. This analysis revealed a sustained representation for approximately 1 second, but no longer throughout the entire delay period. We conclude by arguing for more awareness of the potentially pervasive and ubiquitous effects of eye movement-related confounds.Significance statementVisual working memory is an important aspect of higher cognition and has been subject of much investigation within the field of cognitive neuroscience. Over recent years, these studies have increasingly relied on the use of neural decoding techniques. Here, we show that neural decoding may be susceptible to confounds induced by stimulus-specific eye movements. Such eye movements during working memory have been reported before, and may in fact be a common phenomenon. Given the widespread use of neural decoding and the potentially contaminating effects of eye movements, we therefore believe that our results are of significant relevance for the field.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiyun Wang ◽  
Bin Xuan ◽  
Shuo Li

Abstract Background: Social attention deficits have been found in individuals with high autistic traits in the non-clinical population However, the eye movement patterns triggered by gaze direction still need to be explored in individuals with different levels of autistic traits, and it remains unknown whether autistic traits can modulate the relationship between joint attention and visual working memory. The aims of this study were to investigate the effect of autistic traits on joint attention and whether autistic traits could further influence visual working memory performance through joint attention. Methods: A total of 46 participants who scored in the top and bottom 20% on the Chinese version of the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) were divided into high- and low-AQ groups. We used a combination of the cueing paradigm, change detection task, and eye-tracking technique to explore behavioral performance and eye movement patterns. The 50% validity gaze and dot cues were set as social and nonsocial cues, respectively. Results: The low-AQ group showed shorter reaction times for the gaze-cued location but not for the dot condition and not for the high-AQ group. The low-AQ group had a higher fixation proportion, more fixation counts both in the gaze-cued and dot-cued locations, and shorter entry time into the target ROI under the valid gaze condition. The high-AQ group only showed a dot cueing effect with a higher fixation proportion and more fixation counts in dot-cued location.Limitations: The small number of memory items may have led participants to encode polygons into long-term memory, which limits the only interpretation of results on visual working memory. In addition, participants in this study were all undergraduates or graduate students, which may limit the generalizability of our findings to a broader population.Conclusions: This finding suggest that autistic traits influence the pattern of attention triggered by gaze and dot cues. Individuals with low-AQ were more adept at using gaze cues to direct attention, while high-AQ individuals were less sensitive to gaze cues and preferred non-social cues. The difference in joint attention further affected the speed of visual working memory.


2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (12) ◽  
pp. 1773-1785 ◽  
Author(s):  
Young Eun Park ◽  
Jocelyn L. Sy ◽  
Sang Wook Hong ◽  
Frank Tong

A prevalent view of visual working memory (VWM) is that visual information is actively maintained in the form of perceptually integrated objects. Such reliance on object-based representations would predict that after an object is fully encoded into VWM, all features of that object would need to be maintained as a coherent unit. Here, we evaluated this idea by testing whether memory resources can be redeployed to a specific feature of an object already stored in VWM. We found that observers can utilize a retrospective cue presented during the maintenance period to attenuate both the gradual deterioration and complete loss of memory for a cued feature over time, but at the cost of accelerated loss of information regarding the uncued feature. Our findings demonstrate that object representations held within VWM can be decomposed into individual features and that having to retain additional features imposes greater demands on active maintenance processes.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reuben Rideaux ◽  
Mark Edwards

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document